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Carrier: Workers as ‘Theatrical Props’

With the number of circus acts and sideshows associated with the incoming presidential administration, it’s easy for even significant events to slip through the cracks. But the Real Estate Tycoon’s silly spectacle of cutting a corporate welfare deal with the Carrier company to relocate only 1000 jobs instead of 2000 has titillated the New York Times and also generated a slew of criticism (of varying levels of coherence) from freemarketers. Bernie Sanders’s analysis is far more useful–he rightly points out that these kinds of deals incentivize bad behavior by corporations–but I’m even more interested in how the workers themselves are empowered or disempowered by bourgeois political posturing.

“Firms like Carrier in effect use jobs as a hostage to get a ransom payment from the government,” Morton Marcus, a retired Indiana University economist, told IPA. Marcus goes on to explain that this framework is what allows corporations to offer public goods to policymakers that can have negative long-term consequences.

It happens all the time. A firm says they’re interested in building a new factory, in expanding. They ask: what can you do for us? So, the local government gives them tax relief, gives them other incentives — building roads, sewers, water system for the firm. Governments used to ease the tax burden on their own citizens by taxing firms, but this tax ‘relief’ for firms is being done in the name of jobs. So, a firm leaves a polluting residue, contaminates the water supply, with the locals, decades from now, forced to deal with the consequences.

Tim Lewandowski of Workers’ Project, Inc. in Fort Wayne, Indiana, says workers are never actually involved in these discussions, guaranteeing that their interests (which correspond to most community members’ interests) are never truly represented.

Here in Indiana, Mike Pence made a living attacking workers. But doesn’t matter if it’s a big ‘trade deal’ or a local tax abatement — any kind of economic development involves a government entity and corporation, supposedly working to save jobs. That’s going on all the time. Yet, workers are always excluded from those discussions, at best they’re theatrical props. But if workers aren’t involved in really making the deal, it ends up being more show than go. A big part of the problem is that deals like this are all self-reporting — something Donald Trump is familiar with. They can say they’re going to have X number of jobs at such-and-such a wage, but who’s checking? We almost have a Soviet system, where it’s a handshake and a fantasy economy, simply for photo-ops.

In politically bargaining these particular jobs, both the corporations and the strongman-showman-president-elect are benefitting from the work the workers already did in winning the benefits associated with the jobs. Lewandowski explains: “The jobs Carrier has been threatening to move are good jobs and they’re good jobs because the workers bargained for those jobs for years and made them good. We’re actually drowning in jobs — if you want to work lousy hours, for lousy pay and be disrespected.”

Imagine a world where elected officials had to bargain with the workers themselves.

By the way, the Institute for Public Accuracy is amazing for the depth they open up in their press releases. Support them here–it’s tax-deductable.